


hearts flew from my hands

by kathillards



Category: Kamen Rider OOO
Genre: Everyone lives, Multi, Polyamory, Post Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21884860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: She had thought, in those cold, lonely months that bled into years, that it would be magical, having them back. Like everything would fall into place. Like they were meant for this.(It's never that easy.)
Relationships: Ankh/Hino Eiji/Izumi Hina
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21
Collections: Another Toku Holiday Special (2019)





	hearts flew from my hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wei (wei_jiangling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wei_jiangling/gifts).



After everything, going back to normal is both easier and harder than Hina ever expected. She had almost thought, in those cold, lonely months that bled into years, that it would be magical, having them back. Like everything would fall into place. Like they were meant for this.

But she’s twenty-three now and she has a job and an apartment and somehow, fitting in the boys she’d fallen in love with all those years ago into her new life isn’t exactly as straightforward and simple as she’d hoped.

Ankh, strangely, isn’t the worst problem.

“That design is stupid,” he says, perched on the top bunk. Hina looks up from the desk to find him staring at her laptop screen even as he has his phone open. “Too busy. Is that really in style now?”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Hina grumbles, but she removes a few of the decorations from her dress mock-up anyway. Annoyingly, Ankh has a good eye for fashion style. “Don’t you have better things to do?”

“Uh, what, like go work with Eiji?” Ankh snorts. “Couldn’t pay me enough for that.”

“You could contribute something to this house, you know,” Hina remarks mildly. “Like money.”

“I think my company should be enough,” Ankh says with a sniff. Hina rolls her eyes but it’s hard to deny that his company does make sitting at home and doing work for her fashion internship slightly more bearable.

Eiji, though, is a different kettle of fish entirely.

She thinks he’s gotten too used to wandering. Too used to clutching that broken medal and searching for something he was never sure he could find. To have found it now, to have Ankh back—it’s like it unsettled some deep part of him that had been wired for a different world. A world without Ankh, a world far away from Hina.

He doesn’t really have a job. People pay him to find things. Ankh thinks it’s stupid; Hina thinks he might be doing it out of necessity. Restless energy, too many years spent searching and walking and waiting. He always comes back in the middle of the night and collapses into his bunk full of exhaustion.

She’s still up one night when he comes back, dropping a wad of cash onto the first drawer of her desk. Hina will take it to the bank; she’s the one who does most of the normal society things around here. Ankh is still adjusting and Eiji… she doesn’t know if he’ll ever adjust.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asks him quietly.

Eiji slips off his shoes and smiles at her in the darkness. “I always do, don’t I?”

Hina turns, shutting her laptop screen down so her terrible designs aren’t glaring at her anymore. Eiji is changing into his night clothes, and when he tugs his horrendous purple shirt off, she inhales at the sight of his back—new scars crisscrossed over the skin, scars she’s never seen before. They don’t look very deep, but there’s a lot of them, as if he got in a fight with a mountain lion—or a monster.

(Unbidden, the memories rush out of her subconsciousness—the stench of Yummies, the terror of Greeeds, the fear that pumped through her for a whole year, fighting and running and learning to be someone new, someone strong enough to survive this.

It’s not that she’s ever forgotten; it’s just that she keeps the memories tucked away in a corner of her heart, where people can’t poke and prod and turn her inside out. Where other people can’t get in between the fierce, desperate bonds that tie the three of them together.)

“Eiji,” she begins, unsure of where she’s going. “Don’t you think…”

He shrugs on another shirt and turns around. “Think what?”

Ankh’s voice floats down from the top bunk. “Don’t you want to stop?”

He sounds half-annoyed and half-sleepy, but there’s an undercurrent of concern he still would never admit to. Hina knows that Eiji senses it, because he stiffens slightly when she turns her table lamp on, suffusing the room in a deep, golden glow.

“You can’t just spend your whole life traveling, hunting for other people’s treasures,” Hina points out, reaching for his hand. Eiji’s not standing very far from her, but he still startles when she touches him.

“I’m helping people,” he says slowly. “Date’s hospital, and the Kougami Foundation, they have jobs and—things to do.”

He doesn’t say: _things that need me to fight_. Hina thinks of his scars and swallows.

“Yeah, things that take you away every other day,” Ankh snaps. There’s a rustling of sheets and then he lands on the floor with a _thud_ of his feet, skipping the ladder entirely. “For all that time you spent looking for a way to get me back, I would have thought you’d want to appreciate it more.”

The accusation settles hard and heavy in the air around them. Eiji slips his hand out of Hina’s and goes to sit on the bottom bunk with a deep sigh. Ankh remains standing, arms crossed, his hair sticking up in the back at awkward angles. For once, both of them look ruffled. Hina looks between the two and imagines them all five years younger, fresh with hope and flushed with victory.

_The more things change, the more things stay the same_ , Chiyoko had said when Ankh had walked back into the Cous Coussier with the two of them at his side. She had been smiling as she said it, but it strikes Hina now as a deeply sad sentiment.

“It doesn’t feel the same,” Eiji admits, his voice low and careful with his words. Ankh ‘tsk’s and crosses his arms. “I thought, the three of us together, everything would be…”

He trails off and meets Hina’s eyes. “I feel like we barged back into your life without even giving you a choice in it. And you have so much going on and we’re just… dragging you down.”

Hina opens her mouth then closes it. The first thought she has, which she bites back, is ‘ _You’re an idiot_.’

“You’re an idiot,” Ankh says for her, and rolls his eyes when Eiji and Hina both turn to look at him. “If she wanted to kick us out, she would. Right?”

He glances at Hina with a raised eyebrow, as if daring her to question his logic.

Hina feels a smile tug at her lips. “Right. I think maybe it’s my fault—this apartment wasn’t really meant for three and I’ve been trying to fit you guys into my life around the edges. It’s not like things can go back to how they were at Cous Coussier, but…”

“Yeah.” Eiji exhales and looks from Hina to Ankh. His gaze has softened a little, less on the defensive than he was earlier. “I’ve spent so long chasing after you, I think I’ve forgotten how to be with you,” he confesses.

Ankh’s lips twist. “Well, that’s stupid of you. I’m the only one who hasn’t changed.”

“That’s not true,” Hina says. “You’re different, too. Way less… uh, volatile.”

“ _Volatile_?” Ankh demands.

“Come on,” Eiji laughs. “Back in the days, you would have betrayed us at the drop of a dime.”

His smile is fond and Hina finds herself smiling back. It was a long-ago life, the three of them together, Eiji with the medals, the constant fire and fear and fights. She barely remembers a time before them, before Ankh had stolen her brother and Eiji had drawn her into his strange, terrible world to fight an ancient war.

“Yeah, well.” Ankh huffs and flops down on the bottom bunk next to Eiji. “I wouldn’t do that _now_.”

Hina raises her eyebrows. “Really?”

Ankh rolls his eyes. “I spent a long time waiting for you two.” For a second, it looks like he wants to say more, but stops himself. “That doesn’t mean you aren’t both annoying, though. Just get a bigger bed and then we can all sleep together.”

“Okay,” Hina giggles. “Tomorrow, we’ll go shopping for beds. No running off,” she says to Eiji. “And no whining about ice cream.”

“I don’t _whine_ ,” Ankh insists.

“Yes, you do,” Eiji tells him, and ducks to avoid Ankh’s swipe.

Hina tosses a pillow at the two of them. “Go to sleep,” she says, but she’s smiling as she does.

It’s not that things are magically better, now that Ankh is back. She doesn’t think anything with the three of them will ever be as easy as it could be, if they were different people, if they hadn’t gone through what they did together. If she were a normal girl who loved a normal boy, not a wanderer and a monster she had fallen in love with so many years ago.

But if she didn’t love them, she wouldn’t be here. And _here_ , she thinks— _here_ with Eiji laughing and Ankh throwing the pillow back at her and Hina tracing over Eiji’s scars with salve while he shivers and the three of them not sleeping, just wrapped up in her too-small bed listening to each other breathing—is the only place she could ever want to be.


End file.
